Dutch team considers taking back hazardous waste
Dutch team considers taking back hazardous waste
JAKARTA (JP): A team from the Dutch government began
inspection of 65 containers of used plastic and other waste which
came from Rotterdam and has been left unclaimed at Tanjung Priok
port because they were declared illegal imports.
The four-person team was sent after Indonesia demanded that
the Netherlands take them back, saying that the exports
contravened an international treaty against the shipment of toxic
and hazardous waste.
It remained unclear however whether the Dutch government was
willing to take them back and none of the team members were
willing to give any assurances yesterday.
"We've come here to show our genuine concern to deal with
these problems," a member of the team said in a meeting with
port, customs, police and environmental officers yesterday.
"But what we can do is to find and to make inventory of these
problems and then report them to our ministry of environment and
public prosecutor which in turn can sue the exporters," he said.
"To reexport this waste into our country is beyond our
authority," the Dutch official said.
Three members of the team are officials of the Ministry of
Environment. The fourth was from the Environmental Police Agency.
All four, through their Indonesian hosts, requested anonymity and
that their names not mentioned by the Indonesian press for
"safety reasons".
Yesterday the team sought to match the documents they had with
the container identification and during their two week mission
here they will try to determine whether all the contents
originated from the Netherlands or whether they had been mixed on
they way to Indonesia.
"Many of them may have been mixed with waste from Florida,
Hong Kong, Singapore and other places as shown in the document,"
a member of the team said.
The team members said that not all the 65 containers
necessarily originated from their country because Rotterdam is
widely used by other countries as a transit port.
The Dutch team next week will be reinforced by experts who
will conduct physical examination of the waste.
The Head of Toxic and Hazardous section of the Environmental
Impact Management Agency (Bapedal), Mas Nellyarti, said the Dutch
team came after Indonesia sent documents of 11 shipments of
hazardous containers that originated from the Netherlands.
Of the 11, the Dutch government confirmed only four as owned
and exported by Dutch companies.
"We hope that the confirmed containers will be reexported as
soon as possible," she said.
Some 260 containers of toxic and hazardous waste have been
piled up in Tanjung Priok, and Surabaya and Medan ports since
Indonesia imposed a ban on their imports in 1992.
The government has been left in a dilemma since environmental
groups here oppose its plan to incinerate them while their
countries of origin have been reluctant to accept them back.
The presence of unclaimed containers is also costing the
Tanjung Priok Port Authority huge losses in storage fees.
Nellyarti said the government in the meantime is preparing to
prosecute the Indonesian agencies which imported the waste.
Bapedal has sent the laboratory tests of eight containers
containing toxic and hazardous waste as evidence to the Attorney
General's office which is preparing the prosecution.
The Attorney General's office has already turned over 18
dossiers to the North Jakarta Court. (prs)